A Hitch in Time

Review

Apparently I started this book in February, last year. I remember my intention was to read an essay or two between other books or at leisure, so as to parse out these echoes of a pre-9/11 Hitchens. Whatever happened, that didn’t. I read in a short burst and then the occasional hiccup, then months and months later I picked it up if only to get it off my goodreads “currently reading” section, swallowing up the last 150 pages as best I could.

I am sure there are a lot of folks that consider Hitchens a big influence, and I guess I’m one of them, in a way. Growing up in a rural, conservative, Christian space, Hitchens’ acerbic distaste for all things religious delighted me. I would watch clips of his debates and his appearances on C-SPAN, and model parts of my presentation style on him. Of course, this was an immature mistake. There is a fine line between being mean to someone engaging in demagoguery and manipulation at a mass level, and then simply being a high school twerp bullying the religious.

In years since, I’ll revisit some of these clips (graciously collected on Youtube as “hitchslaps”—could you call it a portmanteau? Certainly it carries its sexist baggage), and they’re often worth a laugh. Sometimes, though, I wonder what the point of it all is. Hitchens is very funny and intelligent and well-spoken. I wonder who his ‘hitchslaps’ are convincing. I wonder what it looks like to be merciless to ideologues and identitarians in positions of power, but to be sanguine towards people being corralled by them.

I must say, lately getting e-mails at work encouraging prayer and protection against “anti-Christian bias,” I wish Hitchens were around to do some bullying to those that deserve it.

These texts have Hitchens writing pre-9/11, before his stark turn to warmongering. Unlike my 13-year-old self, I now live in Washington D.C.—quite literally steps from Hitchens’ former home—and I wonder if I woke up one day and saw smoke rising from the Pentagon and turned on the news to see towers collapsing in on themselves, instead of seeing these things on the raised corner television of my classroom in rural Illinois, I’d have had a different trajectory. I doubt it, but who knows?

Anyway, the book is a good collection of Hitchens’ writing for the London Review of Books. Some of them are delightful, some are terribly long (the piece on Isaiah Berlin is something like 40-pages long, and I confess I got bored of it and skimmed the second half). There is the odd letter responding to Hitchens and sometimes responding to the responder. One, written by Francis Wheen, is a real treat: “would [Roger Scruton] care to apologize for this libel—and, in the future, to consign his malodorous ruminations to their proper place in his Whitshire cesspit?” (pg274.)

What a treat of regionalism and vocabulary!

I’d probably only recommend this to folks who love Hitchens’ writing, and won’t be too bummed out by the dark period between the end of this book and his return to sanity. The return (if my memory is right) which, unfortunately, coincided with his terminal cancer diagnosis. That diagnosis facilitated Hitchens’ best pieces of writing, for Vanity Fair titled Mortality.

Notes

• Page 122-123 has a nice little anecdote where George Stephanopoulos calls inquiring if Hitchens knows the origin of the phrase, “the center cannot hold.” Quite funny to think about.
• Francis Wheen writes, in a letter defending Hitchens to Roger Scruton: “would [Roger] care to apologize for this libel—and, in the future, to consign his malodorous ruminations to their proper place in his Whitshire cesspit?” What a treat of regionalism and vocabulary.